1. Q*Bert, narrated
2. Anatomy of a Fake Gamer
3. Internal Game Economies
4. SimCity wish lists
5. The Spike TV Video Game Awards: for your consideration
6. Essential music for Grand Theft Auto V 7. Wikipedia: The Game
8. The history of games as a male activity
9. Overused protagonist archetypes
10. The most pretentious video game ever made
Music: Francoise Hardy – “Le Temps d’Amour”
Jacques Dutronc – “Les Playboys”
France Gall – “Teeny Weeny Boppie”
Francoise Hardy – “Ce Petit Coeur”
Panel:
Cifaldi, Frank
Rogers, Tim
Sheffield, Brandon
What the heck, man? Did you miss the livestream this week again? We reminded you about it like ten times! Okay, don’t panic. The good news is that the main event has been preserved for all time right here in our podcast archive. Here’s an overview of the topics frank, tim, and brandon discussed while you totally dropped the ball:
1. Brandon’s homework assignment
2. Fighting game spinoffs
3. Using the GPS in smartphone games
4. Rail shooters
5. Redrafting ESRB policy
6. Acceptable circumstances in which to use the word “epic”
7. Jobs which prepare you for game design
8. How the impending Mayan apocalypse will affect the video game industry
9. Exceptional minigames
10. Minesweeper, reimagined as a Tetsuya Nomura project
Look. I don’t want this to happen again any more than you do. So why not join our Facebook group? We’ll be sure to let you know when the show’s coming up, and even provide a link to where you can watch it. I promise no one will look at you funny like you just showed up for the first time in class halfway through the semester.
While you’re at it, you can drop a quick e-mail to podcast@insertcredit.com some time between now and December 25th to let us know what your pick is for the 2012 Game of the Year! We’ll discuss the results in our final show of the year, provided we have not all ascended to an ineffable plane of existence on the back of Quetzalcoatl.
Special thanks as always to soundsman Andrew Toups, who provided original music for this week’s episode. Hot job, Toups!
Remember guys: YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, email, Twitter, RSS. I think that’s everything. Is that everything?
We’ve threatened you with it before, and this time we actually followed through — we had our very first livestreamed podcast! We had a blast doing it, so if the lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, that’s how we’ll be doing those from here on out. We were blown away by how many of you who showed up on such short notice! In the future, we’ll be keeping you in the loop through our Facebook group. So if you haven’t joined yet, now’s the time. Keep sending in your questions to podcast@insertcredit.com, and we’ll see you later this week. Or, at any rate, you’ll see us.
-alex jaffe didn’t realize his hair was getting that thin
regarding the perfect situational compound videofriction
a writtenthing about castlevania, by the milliseconds
by tim rogers
This week, a reader of my Formspring asked me a question regarding compound videofrictions. My 2,000-word answer details what I think to be the superlative example of what professional action game designers who look exactly like me often call “situational compound videofriction”: Richter Belmont’s back-step in Dracula X: Rondo of Blood for the PC-Engine Duo.
I’m gonna be honest with you guys: there is no possible way we’re ever going to be able to live up to last week’s show. Prepare for every episode of this podcast to pale in comparison to Episode 19, because I don’t think we have it in us to do another one like that. It’s a once in a lifetime sort of thing, and if you heard it, it is now a part of you forever. Still, we can’t exactly leave you hanging, so Tim, Frank, and Reserve Panelist Patrick Miller show up this week for a nice chat about . . . these things:
1. Roll-Playing Games
2. Games as recruiting devices
3. Warren Spector’s DuckTales
4. Level editors
5. “Playing for the story”
6. Four consonants which will change your life
7. Women in Rockstar games
8. Packing swimsuits
9. The most difficult type of video game to review
10. Bottom Line Reviews: Console Edition
Remember to rate and review our show on iTunes, guys! It’s not an inherently evil program, people. If you don’t have it you can just install it, leave us a review, and then uninstall it. Nobody checks that sort of thing. Come on, tell me you at least have a Facebook page. Because we’re on there too! Join the party! What? You have got to be kidding me, you don’t have iTunes or Facebook? Man.
Man.
Okay, let me think about this. All right. Here’s what we’re going to do: you can send an e-mail to podcast@insertcredit.com with your questions for the show, or your recorded responses to one of our topics (60 seconds or less, please). You’ve got e-mail, right? I think they give you one with your birth certificate now. The government can fine you for not having one.
Thanks again to Andrew Toups for coming through with some most excellent sound editing! Did you know he’s in a band? I saw them last week and they were pretty hot. Here is their Wikipedia article. We don’t even have a Wikipedia article! So that’s pretty impressive. Talk to you next week!
Pong was released in 1972 — that’s forty years ago. Forty years is a long time for something to exist without anyone else bothering to make anything better than it. (more…)
Hey, kids! We know last week’s episode was a little spooky, so we’re calming things down this week with a quiet affair with just tim, frank, brandon and yours truly. You know, like it was in the first month of the podcast, except this time we almost know what we’re doing. I think this is one of our best episodes! But don’t take my word for it, judge for yourself after hearing us cover these astounding topics:
1. Sanford and Son on the PlayStation Vita
2. Polygon’s search for an identity
3. Preorder bonuses and collector’s editions
4. Surviving the Devil
5. Explaining Dishonored to your mom
6. Disney’s LucasArts buyout (LucasArts’ Disney buyout? One of those)
7. Spoiler-free Portal 3 predictions
8. Square Enix charging us like 15 bucks for mobile games
9. The P.T. Barnum of video games
10. Owning a GameCube
MORE GOOD NEWS: The Insert Credit Podcast is now on Facebook! If you’re one of the billion people on this planet with a Facebook account, you can use the pre-built Facebook interface to indicate that you like us by hitting the button with the thumbs-up sign (in many cultures, the hand signal which indicates approval) and the word “like”. Discuss our episodes, our topics, our music, our game show rounds, tell us who you want on the show, who you’d like back on the show, which of our panelists is the cutest, and meet your fellow fans.
While you’re using the internet to indicate your approval of this podcast, you can go to iTunes and leave us a rating and review, or email me at podcast@insertcredit.com with your feedback, your fanmail, your questions for future episodes, or your own audio recording of 60 seconds or less responding to one of our previous topics. Special thanks once again to Andrew Toups for knocking it out of the sound-editing park this week.
And as for you, listeners: as the Pokemon Center nurse ominously says, “We hope to see you again!”
-alex jaffe once preordered kingdom hearts: 358/2 days for the puffy stickers but never got them
“ten super nintendo games you can purchase for less than $100 each”
by tim rogers
Hello, my lovelies!
I suppose many of you don’t know that I have a Formspring. Formspring is a website where people can ask people questions, either anonymously . . . or nonymously.
I’ve been glibly, quickly, hiply answering a lot of questions in as few words as possible (“What magazine would you most like to be on the cover of?” “Big Penis Decadely”), though every now and again I look at a question and decide to give it a good once-over.
Someone recently asked me “I just got a SNES, and you just so happen to be in control of the next ten games I will buy and play on the SNES. What are the 10 games I should play that aren’t going going to cost 100+ on ebay? And what are 1 or 2 rarer games that are worth it?”
I liked this question, so I decided to give it a long answer — which I have decided to post here. I had fun answering it. So: it gives me an idea — send me questions to my Formspring, either anonymously or not, and maybe I’ll answer them in a short feature post like this on insertcredit.com. Or maybe I won’t! I reserve the right to ignore your question with extreme prejudice.
So . . . think of this as something of a slower-paced, text-based, one-question installment of the insert credit dot com podcast. (I’ve just given myself the idea to write short features based on previous insertcredit.com podcast questions. Oh man. We should do that, guys.)
Anyway, let’s get on with my little answer to that big question:
(alt title: vomiting and throwing iPhones: the future of video games)
To people who play games and people who make them: Our world is changing at a rapid rate, and for once, the people who spent their lives playing and making games are not the ones on the cutting edge. Kickstarter, free-to-play, mobile/social — all of these are things that are changing the medium we love (and not always for the better). Read these four stories about the future of video games, and you will come to embrace change, though maybe not with both arms but just one of those man-hugs that starts with a handshake and transitions into a shoulder-bump with a back-pat finisher.
